There’s No Such Thing as “The Media.”
Don’t trust anyone who uses that phrase without further explanation.
We hear it constantly: “The Media” is biased. “The Media” is rotting our brains. It’s all over “The Media.” Why doesn’t “The Media” talk about that? Such statements are meaningless because there is no such thing as “The Media” in the sense we use the term.
If we say, for example, “The Media” is corrupting our children. What are we referring to? Are the boxes of plastic and wires on the shelf actively warping the viewer? Is the creative content being acted out influencing minds? Or is the corrupting force the vast enterprise of business practices, profit motives, and marketing techniques that contracted the creation of the content distributed by the box?
For some it’s just easier to generalize. Others find it self serving to have a monolithic “other” to contrast against or be the villain. More and more often “The Media” is being used as a label to characterize competing media outlets or to lump together any media that is seen to disagree with that person’s perspective. An obvious progression of this is “the mainstream media.” A phrase not only heard on outlets seen as agreeable but on the outlets being criticized as well—Creating a self contradicting loop.
The phrase “The Media” is now a tell tale sign of a caustic circle.
However it is used, the phrase “The Media” is now a tell tale sign of a caustic circle. One we all must avoid for the sake of healthy discourse. When we say “The Media” we are referring to a much more interconnected concept than just a single entity.
In order to actually understand “The Media” we must stop using that phrase and instead learn to see the interconnected parts and complex interrelationships that comprise the concept. Perhaps the simplest breakdown would be into: technology, systems, and culture.
- Technology: the box (medium) and its technological biases | communication tools: photography, videography, graphic design, fine art, speech, drama, broadcast, and writing.
- Systems: the business and its motives | social systems, market systems, legal systems, corporations, institutions, etc.
- Culture: the people and their content | shared experiences, values, and creative expressions, consumerism, etc.
Only through understanding these individual parts and interconnections can we hope to understand the full extent of media’s social and cultural effects. Ultimately, the power of media is not just in the technology, systems, or culture independently, but in the interrelationships between them.
For example: To send moving pictures into millions of homes is certainly a neat trick but the true genius would be to use those images in a way that shapes the worldview of countless people. Maintaining agency as an independent and critical thinker in this ecosystem requires an equally sophisticated understanding of technology, systems, and culture.
Of course, it’s vastly more cumbersome to understand and talk about media in these parts as opposed to a monolithic “other.” Yet we must. Here are some basic steps:
Step 1: Stop using the phrase “The Media.”
It‘s nonsensical. I do not let students use the phrase in any class or in any work. Instead, they must specify the technology, systems, and culture they are referring to. For example: “An op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times via my online Facebook app.” Every piece of that statement shapes the interpretation of the message and provides context vital for shared understanding.
Don’t trust anyone who uses the phrase “The Media” without further explanation.
Generalizing to “the Times,” or “mainstream media” does nothing for the discourse and simply signals a politicized or biased point. Don’t trust anyone who uses the phrase “The Media” without further explanation. That person is just looking to polarize you. All made even more ridiculous by the fact that you’re likely hearing them make that point via media.
Instead, speak in specific technology, systems, and culture. Or, if alliteration is helpful: content, control, container. What type of content is it? Who is in control of that content? In what container was that content delivered to you?
Step 2: Consider the technological bias inherent in each type of media.
Every medium has its own biases — a message of its own. You know this in the way a story or information when read has a different effect on you than if watched. The book and the movie are not the same. You watch a movie with people, but look at social media alone. The technology shapes the message.
Every medium has its own biases — a message of its own.
For example: it’s possible that any content received through the television is interpreted as entertainment due to the nature of visual media delivered in that format. Or it may be that content delivered through social media is inherently self promoting due to the construct of those platforms.
To test this: Is the state of political reporting about discourse and policy or more about entertainment and/or opinion? Your answer may depend on what medium you get your information from. Policy makers aren’t getting their information from TV shows, so why are you?
Step 3: Recognize media systems and their biases.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (legal system) sparked a decade of mergers that led to all of our cultural industries being owned and controlled by increasingly all-powerful conglomerates.
In a consumer social system, this consolidation quickly revealed (or perhaps demanded) biases on everything from products to politics in order to keep advertisers paying and viewers happily tuned in. Is a significant segment of viewers interested in content favorable to one end of the political spectrum? Then there will be a network just for them — complete with the products and identity that validates their perspective.
To complicate this, by 2010, only 118 people comprised the board of directors for the ten biggest media companies. Those 118 individuals also sat on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Even the media conglomerates shared board members with each other. This deepens the systemic ownership, power, and control into every area of modern society. Once you understand these consumer systems for what they are it becomes a little easier to see what the ownership systems are up to and why.
However, by 2005 something unexpected happened. The new technology of the internet got a second chance (after the 2001 crash) and rapidly reshaped the media landscape. This is the year social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all landed in full force. The all-powerful media conglomerates were instantly challenged and their power was decentralized. Here is where the phrase “The Media” lost all meaning.
Here is where the phrase “The Media” lost all meaning.
Increasingly, the majority of people now get their information and entertainment from fragmented sources such as blogs, social media posts, and YouTube. A single YouTube channel that you’ve never heard of can (and does) get more viewers than the traditional nightly television news program. As amazing as this is, it also creates even more complexity in understanding the messages we receive from various media. We are seeing this in the rise of the term “fake news” becoming a commonly used and equally meaningless generalization.
*Keep in mind, newer technological platforms and accompanying ownership systems have cultures of their own — all with biases. For example: using Facebook is different from Twitter and Snapchat. Each have their own strengths, posting etiquette, style, and language that need to be understood. You can see this in the ways traditional marketers regularly fail to understand these platforms and the culture of its users.
To test this: Where do you get your news? Who owns them? Where are their loyalties? (If the content is free it more susceptible consumer pressures and profit motive over the truth.) Rest assured, the same thing is happening in your fiction content as well. In this environment, media becomes less about meaning and more about manipulation.
In this environment media becomes less about meaning and more about manipulation.
Step 4: Understand the cultural significance of the content.
Inside the buildings owned by those corporations are offices and in those offices are people. Actual people doing the best they can to bring messages and creativity to life through hard work, dedication to craft, and often compromising with budgets, bosses, technology, and personal biases.
We have agency in production and meaning.
Understanding the messages from any medium means understanding the culture (ideas, values, norms, dreams) of the people making the content. Our media is our culture. We have agency in production and meaning. At the root of it all, it’s just us people grinding out our culture making. Sometimes it is beautiful and true. Other times it is manipulative profiteering.
Many thousands of the best-trained individual minds have made it a full-time business to get inside the collective public mind. To get inside in order to manipulate, exploit, control is the object now.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
Either way, we are culture makers. Nothing is made without us. We can decide what is made, what is featured, and what is listened to. Even within a corporately controlled, profit-centered system, better, truer, and more meaningful messages can be made.
“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.” ~ Banksy
To test this: Where do the people who make the messages you spend the most time with come from? What is their culture? How is that culture showing up in media forms? Do you spend any time with messages created within other cultural contexts (minority outlets, etc.) How might doing so shape your understandings?
Step 5: Accept that there is no “they.”
When I consult organizations the first thing I listen for is the word “they.” As in, “They won’t let us.” Or, “They don’t understand.” The goal then becomes to find out who “they” are and if a “they” even exists. I’ll warn leadership, “you have a ‘they’ problem.” When an organization doesn’t think in “we” or at least of specific people, then its culture is in trouble. The people become passive — distrust and apathy grows. Rooting out “they” can take work and dialog.
In the current media landscape, no monolithic other of “The Media” really exists. We are they. We all have access to powerful platforms and mass distribution. We are all culture makers and consumers. The only counterbalance to the consolidation of technological, systemic and cultural power into so few hands is a public engaged in healthy discourse using our newly attained mediated connectedness.
A mediated culture is a land of gross caricatures, half-truths, and blatant exaggerations, and the common individual, no matter how hard he or she may try, is NOT the person on the TV screen and it is time we stop treating anyone as if they were.
This will take an immense amount of work and dialog. Media technologies must remain freely accessible and unthrottled. New media systems of decentralized control must be protected. Our culture needs to reject a consumer posture and embrace a creative one.
